Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

Welcome! I'm so glad you're considering PL 270. This is an online (scheduled meetings) course that meets weekly via Zoom on Thursday evenings. Attendance at the live class sessions is expected.

Plan on roughly 9 to 12 hours per week for the coursework. Your grade is built across attendance and participation, weekly reading and writing assignments, scenario-based exercises that ask you to apply Oregon landlord-tenant law to real fact patterns, and a final project.

What this course is. Housing is a basic human need, and in Oregon and across the country it is also one of the sites where law most directly determines who has stability, safety, and dignity, and who does not. PL 270 is the course where you learn the rules that govern the landlord-tenant relationship. We work with Oregon's Residential Landlord and Tenant Act (ORS Chapter 90), local Portland and Multnomah County ordinances, and federal fair housing law, applying each to the kinds of fact patterns paralegals actually encounter, including habitability disputes, repair demands, screening violations, eviction defense, and disaster displacement.

The framework. Landlord-tenant law in Oregon is structured around a fundamental asymmetry: landlord rights are clearly defined and quickly enforced, while tenant rights are general, vague, and require tenant initiative to assert. Once you see this pattern, you see it everywhere in the statute, and you can read the law more accurately, counsel tenants more effectively, and recognize when a remedy that exists on paper is or is not actually available in practice. We name this pattern explicitly throughout the course, and we use it as our analytical lens.

Required text. There is no textbook to purchase. All readings are provided through D2L, and Oregon statutes are available free through the Oregon Legislature's website at oregonlegislature.gov.

A note on AI. This course has a very clear and strict academic integrity policy on AI usage. Please read the syllabus.

About your instructor. I'm Megan Dorton, a licensed Oregon attorney and faculty member in PCC's Paralegal Program. I practice in family, housing, and administrative law, and I came to PCC to help train future legal professionals to increase access to justice. I have spent close to thirty years in tenant advocacy, including as Statewide Legal Education Director at the Community Alliance of Tenants. I love this course and I look forward to working with you. You can reach me anytime at megan.dorton@pcc.edu.